Podcast

Sreeram Kannan is the Founder and CEO of EigenLayer. Backed by Blockchain Capital, Figment Capital, WAGMI Ventures, & more, EigenLayer is the first market for decentralized trust—creating an ecosystem for restaking, which enables staked ETH to be used as cryptoeconomic security for protocols other than Ethereum, in exchange for protocol fees and rewards. In this episode we discuss Sreeram’s journey through academia, the key insights that produced EigenLayer, the many use cases enabled by EigenLayer, the importance of focus for early-stage projects, and much more.

Adeniyi Abiodun is the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at Mysten Labs. Backed by a16z Crypto, Jump Capital, Binance Labs, Electric Capital, & more, Mysten Labs is all about building critical infrastructure to enable a more decentralized internet. They’re perhaps best known as the creators of Sui, a decentralized, proof of stake blockchain with horizontally scalable throughput and storage. In this episode we discuss Adeniyi’s crypto journey (with a focus on the jump from Meta to creating Mysten Labs), what Mysten Labs gets uniquely right as a team, early challenges (and solves) as well as exciting possibilities for the future, thoughts on the current moment in crypto (from a technology and maturation perspective), & much more.

Blake West is the Co-Founder & CTO of Goldfinch. Backed by a16z, Goldfinch is a decentralized credit protocol that allows anyone to be a lender, not just banks. With ~$100m in active loan value at time of recording, Goldfinch is the clear leader in on-chain emerging market credit – aka, crypto lending meets real-world businesses. In this episode we discuss challenges and surprises in the early days of Goldfinch, blockers to emerging market credit formation (and why obstacles exist), speculation about the possibility of a unified/global on-chain capital market, and Blake’s best generalizable advice for founders across web3 (hint: ignore the token at first).

Brett Gibson is the Managing Partner at Initialized Capital. Initialized Capital is an early-stage venture firm that champions some of today’s most inspired and obsessive builders and thinkers, with 27+ unicorns (like Coinbase, Instacart, & Flexport), $3.2b in assets under management, and 175+ portfolio companies. In this episode we discuss Brett’s fascinating journey from software engineer to early YC founder to Managing Partner at Initialized Capital, the investment thesis for crypto at Initialized, what’s most exciting these days across the crypto landscape from Brett’s unique vantage point, how to interpret the present moment in crypto, his most generalizable advice for crypto founders (from an investor perspective), and much, much more.

Bryce Ferguson & Jack Kearney are the Co-Founders of Turnkey. Backed by Sequoia, Variant, Coinbase, & Exponent, Turnkey enables developers to spin-up thousands of wallets and sign millions of transactions, all without compromising on security. In this episode we discuss the preceding steps to launching Turnkey (and how they reached conviction on the opportunity), earliest challenges and surprises (and how their team navigated both), how crypto’s changed in the intervening years since their entrance to the space, & much more.